Indefectibles

Leonid Brezhnev is one smart cookie. That’s why he welcomed the suggestion of that mysterious millionaire, Dr. Armand Hammer, that there was no better way to celebrate the joys of detente than by extensive loans of Soviet-owned art to the United States. Recently, the special risks inherent in most cultural exchange must have become more and more obvious to Soviet leaders: their ballet dancers defect, so do their musicians and writers, while even highly paid scientists are embarrassingly eager to give up their dachas for the delights of basic research in Western laboratories. But masterpieces of art, non-controversial as long as their creators are securely dead and buried, are safe. They won’t defect. And they attract hordes of viewers subliminally grateful to the Soviet Union for letting them look at its treasures—the fine Impressionist paintings shown in 1973, last year’s Scythian gold, and now a small but superlative selection of pictures from Leningrad s Hermitage Museum, lent in honor of the Bicentennial. After a month in Washington’s National Gallery, it was shown in New York at Knoedler’s (whose president, surprise, surprise, is Dr. Hammer), traveled to the Detroit Art Institute in November and then to the Los Angeles County Museum (December 16 to Janury 27), and will wind up at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (February 3 to March 6).

The lines were as long at Knoedler’s as they were in Washington, and rightly so, for with only minor caveats the pictures are marvels, especially the two Rembrandts—Saskia as Flora, painted just before the artist’s marriage, and the glowing, haunting David and Uriah, a product of his old age—not to mention the Caravaggio, the Poussin, the Rubens landscape, the brilliant Matisses. Yet amid the general euphoria this show inevitably generates, it is well to remember that these works were acquired not by Russia’s Communist masters but by their hated predecessors, the Czars; indeed, one of the most autocratic of all these autocrats, Nicholas I, was the first to install some of the royal art holdings in a public museum, opened in 1852. The great twentieth century works, the Cezannes, Gauguins, Picassos, Matisses, were bought in the early 1900s by two Moscow merchants (that’s what the catalogue calls them, not “capitalists”) and expropriated after the revolution. For long years these “decadent” masterpieces were off limits to Soviet citizens, though selected foreigners were allowed a look-see.

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Ruth Berenson

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Leonid Brezhnev is one smart cookie. That’s why he welcomed the suggestion of that mysterious millionaire, Dr. Armand Hammer, that there was no better way to celebrate the joys of detente than by extensive loans of Soviet-owned art to the United States. Recently, the special risks inherent in most cultural exchange must have become more and more obvious to Soviet leaders: their ballet dancers defect, so do their musicians and writers, while even highly paid scientists are embarrassingly eager to give up their dachas for the delights of basic research in Western laboratories. But masterpieces of art, non-controversial as long as their creators are securely dead and buried, are safe. They won’t defect. And they attract hordes of viewers subliminally grateful to the Soviet Union for letting them look at its treasures—the fine Impressionist paintings shown in 1973, last year’s Scythian gold, and now a small but superlative selection of pictures from Leningrad s Hermitage Museum, lent in honor of the Bicentennial. After a month in Washington’s National Gallery, it was shown in New York at Knoedler’s (whose president, surprise, surprise, is Dr. Hammer), traveled to the Detroit Art Institute in November and then to the Los Angeles County Museum (December 16 to Janury 27), and will wind up at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (February 3 to March 6).

The lines were as long at Knoedler’s as they were in Washington, and rightly so, for with only minor caveats the pictures are marvels, especially the two Rembrandts—Saskia as Flora, painted just before the artist’s marriage, and the glowing, haunting David and Uriah, a product of his old age—not to mention the Caravaggio, the Poussin, the Rubens landscape, the brilliant Matisses. Yet amid the general euphoria this show inevitably generates, it is well to remember that these works were acquired not by Russia’s Communist masters but by their hated predecessors, the Czars; indeed, one of the most autocratic of all these autocrats, Nicholas I, was the first to install some of the royal art holdings in a public museum, opened in 1852. The great twentieth century works, the Cezannes, Gauguins, Picassos, Matisses, were bought in the early 1900s by two Moscow merchants (that’s what the catalogue calls them, not “capitalists”) and expropriated after the revolution. For long years these “decadent” masterpieces were off limits to Soviet citizens, though selected foreigners were allowed a look-see.